Read Chapter 12: The Bad Step

The knocking came again as Luc pressed his ear to the wood of the buried door—three quick raps, a pause, two more. Julien's pattern. His father had used it on rescues to signal survivors that help was near, a rhythm that said *hold on, we're coming*. Luc had heard it a hundred times as a child, watching his father practice on the kitchen table with the flat of his hand.

He didn't answer it.

The people outside had chosen their moment. The storm had buried them alive, and still they knocked. That meant they'd come prepared—with shovels, with knowledge of the chalet's layout, with a reason to be here in the worst weather the valley had seen in a decade.

Luc pulled on his shell jacket, checked his headlamp, and moved toward the rear service hatch. He didn't tell anyone where he was going. Henri had suggested he hike out, but Luc had made the decision himself the moment he heard that knock. The patrol hut sat four kilometers up the ridge, stocked with a radio and a proper emergency beacon. He could be there and back in three hours if the snow held.

The hatch opened onto a narrow channel the maintenance crew used in summer. Luc dropped into it, feeling the cold hit his face like a slap. The storm had slackened to a bitter wind threading through the valley, but the snowpack was unstable. He moved quickly, staying close to the rock face where the slope was shallowest.

Twenty minutes of hard going brought him to the stone bridge that crossed the ravine at the saddle. It was the only way up—the rest of the ridge was too exposed, too steep for a solo crossing in these conditions. Luc had crossed this bridge a dozen times on rescue drills. He knew its rhythm, the way the middle plank shifted slightly under weight.

He stopped at its edge.

The bridge was gone. Not collapsed—cut. The ropes that anchored the handrail had been severed cleanly, and the wooden planks lay scattered in the ravine thirty meters below, half-buried in fresh snow. The cuts were too precise for the storm, too even for the cold to have snapped them. Someone had done this deliberately, with a knife or a saw, before the avalanche or perhaps during it, taking advantage of the chaos.

Luc knelt at the anchor point and examined the frayed ends. Clean. Professional. The same hand that had stripped Henri's communications room, the same hand that had screwed the mudroom door shut from outside.

He turned to go back and saw it.

His rope—the one he'd coiled and slung across his chest—lay in the snow three meters behind him. He didn't remember dropping it. He hadn't stopped long enough to unclip it. He reached for it and his hand closed on air where the coil should have been.

He looked down at the rope on the ground. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. The carabiner that had attached it to his harness was unclipped—not broken, not worn, but deliberately released. And the rope itself was cut two meters from the end, the strand parted cleanly in a way that could never happen from friction or wear.

Luc picked it up. His hands were shaking, and not from the cold.

He replayed the last twenty minutes in his mind. He'd clipped the rope before leaving through the hatch. He was certain of that—it was automatic, a guide's habit drilled in over fifteen years. He'd checked it again at the base of the ridge, the same way he always checked before starting a climb.

Someone had followed him out. Someone had watched him ascend the ridge, approached him silently in the white noise of the wind, and unclipped his rope without him feeling it. No—impossible. He would have felt hands on his harness. He would have heard footsteps in the snow.

Unless they'd cut it yourself. Unless this was never meant to be a solo trip.

Luc forced the thought down. That wasn't right. He hadn't dropped his rope, and he hadn't cut it. The only explanation was that someone had done it before he'd even left, while the rope sat in the mudroom. They'd cut it cleanly and re-clipped it so it looked intact until he actually tried to use it under load.

They wanted him to fall.

They wanted him to reach for the rope on a descent, find it severed, and drop. The bridge had been a secondary measure—a way to stop him from reaching the patrol hut. But the rope was the trap. Someone had planned for him to attempt this exact route and fail.

Luc tucked the rope into his pack. Evidence. He began the descent back to the chalet, moving more carefully now, reading the snow in front of him for signs of disturbance. He found them almost immediately—a set of tracks leaving the rear hatch, smaller than his own, heading up the ridge. They stopped at the bridge where the cuts were. Then they descended the way he'd come.

He followed them all the way back to the buried entrance, where they disappeared in the churned snow of the group's earlier digging. Inside the hatch, the mudroom floor was wet with melt from boots that hadn't been out there in the last hour.

Someone had gone out to cut that bridge and returned before the knocking started. Someone inside the chalet had known he was going to try the ridge. Someone had wanted him dead at the bottom of that ravine.

Luc closed the hatch behind him and stood in the mudroom, listening. Through the wall, he heard Viktor's booming laugh, Pierre's answering grumble, the low murmur of Henri's voice, and Camille's softer words. Four of them, plus Ali and Nadia somewhere deeper in the chalet. Six people. And one of them had planned to watch him fall.

He reached into his pocket and touched the half-burned photograph of his father and the scarred man. Ghislaine had mentioned this scarred man, a client who wasn't who he claimed to be. That was the man who'd killed his father. And someone in this chalet was connected to him—Henri, with his hidden room and his wounded history, or the stranger who knocked with Julien's signal.

Luc stepped into the common room. The fire crackled. Six faces turned toward him. He let the silence hang for a moment before he spoke.

"The bridge is cut," he said. "Someone here wants to make sure we never leave this valley."